ME & YOU & EVERYONE WE DON’T KNOW | public art project commissioned by ALANICA FESTIVAL | State Contemporary Art Center | Vladikavkaz Russia | 4 channel video installation | 300 X 500 cm each projection | 2017 / project nominated for INNOVATION Prize 2018
The project ME & YOU & EVERYONE WE DON’T KNOW — is the digital slide show / video installation, visualized collective memory created in cooperation with approximately 50 children from Vladikavkaz, Vladikavkaz Museum of Photography and “North Ossetia” Newspaper. The installation was located in a central park in abandoned building which soon will become State Contemporary Art Center of Vladikavkaz.
/ In the video installation ME & YOU & EVERYONE WE DON’T KNOW slide film materials are scanned mechanically overlapping each other, layer by layer, until the image is almost gone. What before was a linearly formatted story, where each still horizontally follows one another, became a Vertical Story / Vertical Movie with each still stacked on top of each other.
Figurative elements are slowly squeezed out of each still and eventually turn into a dark abstraction. Photo-transparencies are loosing parts of their original story adhesion so the meanings, like the memory itself deteriorates over time. Although as well as in our memory those “dark” areas are not just a blank/black spots. As we witnessed the transformation from figurative to abstract, we know that images are there; that’s what actually makes those areas dark — it’s being full of images/memories.
The Series evokes the famous “Proustian moment”, the madeleine cookie effect described by Marcel Proust’s in his Remembrance of Things Past. The layered image become visual evidence of the moment not just what is perceived, but also how and what is remembered. It is a symbolic reflection of repeated and constant links between perception and memory with its fragmentation / blank spaces /thresholds, its forgotten and coming back to life moments.